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Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

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Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#151

Post by ethbr1 »

dpark wrote: post #148

Have any of these sorts of proclamations ever actually come true? I recall when Reddit effectively cut off all the clients from their API, there were similar loud proclamations that they had ruined their business and everyone would defect. I remember something similar with Twitter. These businesses both have their problems, but blocking third-party apps doesn’t seem to be one of them. I think Anthropic took a look at…

Anthropic thinking they're Reddit ~2023 feels pretty arrogant.

And if they've made a business decision to do this, rolling it out without announcement is even worse.

Did they think no one would notice?

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#152

Post by 8note »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #62
hakanderyal wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try plan mode if you haven't already. Stay in plan mode until it is to your satisfaction. With Opus 4.5, when you approve the plan it'll implement the exact spec without getting off track 95% of the time.

It's fine, but it's still "make big giant plan then yeet the impl" at the end. It's still not appropriate for the kind of incremental, chunked, piecework that's needed in a shop that has a decent review cycle. It's irresponsible to your teammates to dump very large giant finished pieces of work on them for review. I try to impress that on my coworkers, and I don't appreciate getting code reviews like that for submiss…

i think the review cycles weve been doing for the past decade or two are going to change to match the output of the LLMs and how the LLMs prefer to make whole big changes.

i immediately see that the most important thing to have understand a change is future LLMs more than people. we still need to understand whats going on, but if my LLM and my coworkers LLM are better aligned, chances are my coworker will have a better time working with the code that i publish than if i got them to understand it well but without their LLM understanding it.

with humans as the architects of LLM systems that build and maintain a code based system, i think the constraints are different, and that we dont ahve a great idea on what the actual requirements are yet.

it certainly mismatches with how we've been doing things in publishing small change requests that only do a part of a whole

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#153

Post by 8note »

ojosilva wrote: post #28

They did not. Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude Code value chain, which has proven itself to be a winner among devs (me included, after trying everything under the sun in 2025). If anything, Anthropic's mistake is that they are incapable of monetizing their great models in the chat market, where ChatGPT reigns: ie. Anthropic did not invest in image generation, Google did and Gemini has a shot at the…

i think they're trading future customer acquisition and model quality for the current claude code userbase which they might also lose from this choice.

the reason i got the subscription wasnt to use claude code. when i subscribed you couldnt even use it for claude code. i got it because i figured i could use those tokens for anything, and as i figured out useful stuff, i could split it off onto api calls.

now that exploration of "what can i do with claude" will need to be elsewhere, and the results of a working thing will want to stay with the model that its working on.

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#154

Post by dpark »

ethbr1 wrote: post #151
dpark wrote: post #148

Have any of these sorts of proclamations ever actually come true? I recall when Reddit effectively cut off all the clients from their API, there were similar loud proclamations that they had ruined their business and everyone would defect. I remember something similar with Twitter. These businesses both have their problems, but blocking third-party apps doesn’t seem to be one of them. I think Anthropic took a look at…

Anthropic thinking they're Reddit ~2023 feels pretty arrogant. And if they've made a business decision to do this, rolling it out without announcement is even worse. Did they think no one would notice?

Anthropic has like 4x Reddit’s revenue and 8x the valuation. I don’t understand the arrogance.

Plus I’m the one who compared them to Reddit. They certainly didn’t issue a statement that said “well it worked for Reddit”.

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#155

Post by Animats »

Not unexpected.

- Google cutting off using search from other than their home page code. (At one time there was an official SOAP API for Google Search.)

- Apple cutting off non-Apple hardware in the Power PC era. ("We lost our license for speeding", from a third party seller of faster hardware.)

- Twitter cutting off external clients. (The end of TweetDeck.)

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#156

Post by ozim »

nikcub wrote: post #117
ojosilva wrote: post #28

They did not. Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude Code value chain, which has proven itself to be a winner among devs (me included, after trying everything under the sun in 2025). If anything, Anthropic's mistake is that they are incapable of monetizing their great models in the chat market, where ChatGPT reigns: ie. Anthropic did not invest in image generation, Google did and Gemini has a shot at the…

> ie. Anthropic did not invest in image generation, Google did and Gemini has a shot at the market now. They're after the enterprise market - where office / workspace + app + directory integration, security, safety, compliance etc. are more important. 80% of their revenue is from enterprise - less churn, much higher revenue per W/token, better margins, better $/user. Microsoft adopting the Anthropic models into copil…

People underestimate enterprise market.

Usually you can see it when someone nags about “call us” pricing that is targeted at enterprise. People that nag about it are most likely not the customers someone wants to cater to.

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#157

Post by mfkp »

Animats wrote: post #155

Not unexpected. - Google cutting off using search from other than their home page code. (At one time there was an official SOAP API for Google Search.) - Apple cutting off non-Apple hardware in the Power PC era. ("We lost our license for speeding", from a third party seller of faster hardware.) - Twitter cutting off external clients. (The end of TweetDeck.)

- Reddit cutting off API access for third party clients

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#158

Post by socketcluster »

ojosilva wrote: post #28

They did not. Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude Code value chain, which has proven itself to be a winner among devs (me included, after trying everything under the sun in 2025). If anything, Anthropic's mistake is that they are incapable of monetizing their great models in the chat market, where ChatGPT reigns: ie. Anthropic did not invest in image generation, Google did and Gemini has a shot at the…

Agreed. The system is ALL about who controls the customer relationship.

If Anthropic ended up in a position that they had to beg various Client providers to be integrated (properly) and had to compete with other LLMs on the same clients and could be swapped out at a moment's notice, they would just become a commodity and lose all leverage. They don't want to end up in such situation. They do need to control the delivery of the product end-to-end to ensure that they control the customer relationship and the quality.

This is also going to be KEY in terms of democratizing the AI industry for small startups because this model of ai-outside-tools-inside provides an alternative to tools-outside-ai-inside platforms like Lovable, Base44 and Replit which don't leave as much flexibility in terms of swapping out tooling.

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#159

Post by gaigalas »

Both Claude Code and OpenCode users are too loud. It makes sense for them to fight. These are boutique tools, and there can be only one boutique tool.

I have a gut feeling that the real top dog harness (profitability, sticky users, growth) is VSCode + Copilot.

Re: Anthropic made a mistake in cutting off third-party clients

#160

Post by projektfu »

ozim wrote: post #156
nikcub wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ie. Anthropic did not invest in image generation, Google did and Gemini has a shot at the market now. They're after the enterprise market - where office / workspace + app + directory integration, security, safety, compliance etc. are more important. 80% of their revenue is from enterprise - less churn, much higher revenue per W/token, better margins, better $/user. Microsoft adopting the Anthropic models into copil…

People underestimate enterprise market. Usually you can see it when someone nags about “call us” pricing that is targeted at enterprise. People that nag about it are most likely not the customers someone wants to cater to.

When I was a software developer, I mostly griped about this when I wanted to experiment to see if I would even ask my larger enterprise if they would be interested in looking into it. I always felt like companies were killing a useful marketing stream from the enterprise's own employees. I think Tailscale has really nailed it, though. They give away the store to casual users, but make it so that a business will want to talk to sales to get all the features they need with better pricing per user. Small businesses can survive quite well on the free plan.
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